Mourning the Mother I Didn’t Fully Know
Some mothers are easy to grieve. Mine left me sorting through who she really was long after she was gone
She was a cross between the formidable presence of Tura Satana and the volatility of Courtney Love. She showed many sides, and all of them were real. She could be kind, charming, the life of the party, hinting at fluency in Spanish, and able to make you laugh until your ribs hurt. But she could also turn into something else entirely, revealing parts of herself that ranged from unsettling to frightening, especially to a child.
I heard plenty of stories about who my mother was before I was born from family, her friends, my dad, even a couple of my high school teachers who had known her. She told me many herself. How she snuck cigarettes into her Catholic school by rolling them into her knee‑highs, and how she convinced my grandfather to buy her a Corvette in high school because the speedometer was, she claimed, the perfect way to learn the metric system. And a story everyone seemed to know, the time she survived being hit by a train at an intersection while driving my grandmother’s Trans Am.
One of my early memories is riding in the backseat of her Chevy Suburban as The Doors’ “Break on Through (To The Other Side)” blasting on the radio as we went up and down hills on rural roads, her laughing as we both screamed “weeeeeee!” Another is riding shotgun in her Corvette when I was five as we sang along to Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” and me laughing each time hysterically she sang his “Let me sleep on it” line with theatrics as she drove.
The first film she took me to see in theaters was “Gremlins” right after I turned four, and I loved it. Going to the movies became something we did regularly, and she took me to see the rerelease of “E.T.” when I was five, which traumatized me and I still can’t watch that movie as an adult due to the creepy cinematography, the scenes of the scientists busting through the windows of the house in the spacesuits, and… well, you get it.
But my memories of my mother begin before all of that, around three in Peekskill, NY. They’re hazy, missing details, sequence, and explanation, but they’re the first fragments of my life that I can still reach.
The story I can tell about how we ended up in Peekskill comes from what my mother told me in pieces while I was growing up, and from what I know of her life. She had me at 19. My father wasn’t in the picture. By her early 20s, she was living at home with her parents, raising a toddler, and struggling to get along with my grandmother. She wanted out of Ohio and out of that life. That’s where a boyfriend enters the story.
According to what he told me years later, they met in Maine, where both our families vacationed in the summers. They reconnected through letters and phone calls. He lived in Peekskill, they wanted to try a relationship, and we moved into the duplex with him.
I don’t remember the smells or the color of the paint on the walls. What I have are flashes: the way the sunlight came in through the windows and reflected off the wooden floors, my mother’s face and long black hair, her boyfriend’s tough‑guy expression with disheveled hair, and the sense of things happening beyond my understanding.
One memory that repeats itself is the small tricycle I rode across the wooden floors. I’d pedal toward a short flight of five stairs near the door and launch myself off them, always clearing the steps but crashing at the bottom. My mother or her boyfriend would come running, panicked and yelling, and the elderly neighbor would appear to check on me. My mom used to laugh about it later and say, “I didn’t know if you thought you were Evel Knievel or what, but you scared the shit out of me.”
My mom owned a big early ’80s Chevy Suburban Silverado, but we still walked everywhere, day and night. There was a small house we visited owned by a man who dressed in denim, had a beard and a cowboy hat, and kept an acoustic guitar out. I remember running my hand over the strings and trying to slip my hand into the sound hole while he laughed and my mom pulled me away. Even through a toddler’s eyes, something about him unsettled me. I felt uneasy in his house, and whenever he came over, my mom and her boyfriend usually ended up arguing afterward.
Arguments were common. Things only seemed to calm down when my mom went to work, and I was left with her boyfriend. Then something shifted. My mom started taking me down the street to a blue house with a white picket fence where an older couple lived. The man was stocky and stoic with a mustache and salt‑and‑pepper hair. The woman was thin, short‑haired, always smiling, with a calming presence. I started calling them “nana and pop‑up,” though who they were to my mother or her boyfriend is still unclear.
The blue house is more vivid in my memory than the apartment, maybe because all the rooms were brighter inside, even at night.
I’ve heard different versions: that they approached my mother and offered to babysit, that the man knew her boyfriend, that they were connected to his family. Whoever they were, they became a refuge. The woman took me to the Peekskill library often; she read to me and gave me books. I’ve always wondered why Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” felt familiar to me as a child, and I can trace it back to hearing it in their home.
Some of my warmest memories are of the huge tins of assorted cookies they always kept and let me eat from, and the diner trips where I had my first pieces of pie.
But the reality underneath all of this was that my mother and her boyfriend were in a toxic relationship. They fought constantly, and it got worse over time. My mother told me we lived in Peekskill for about a year, and the fighting escalated as the months went on.
Memories of arguments between my mother and her boyfriend come only in flashes, loud voices, angry faces, and the fear I felt waking up in the dark without understanding why. Friends and partners have asked why I’m afraid of the dark, and years later as an adult, I realized it started then. Being woken by their fights, the drinking, and most likely domestic violence outside my bedroom door.
There’s one day I remember vividly. I was home alone with her boyfriend, and he was upset. He locked me in a bedroom. I cried and screamed until I fell asleep. My mother woke me, pulled me into another room where bags, boxes, and our vacuum cleaner were piled. I ran a Hot Wheels car over the vacuum hose until she grabbed my hand, put me in my car seat in the Suburban, and we drove away from the duplex and out of Peekskill.
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I fell asleep again and woke up in a Best Western parking lot along the freeway. The driver’s door was open. My mother was crying while using a payphone. I fell asleep once more and woke up being carried into a house that was dark except for sunlight coming through a screen door. She laid me on a sofa while she talked to a woman.
My memories pick up again when we pulled into the driveway of another house I didn’t recognize. It was home in Mentor, OH, where my grandparents welcomed us with open arms. They felt like strangers to me only because I didn’t know them yet, even though they had helped care for me as a baby. The phone call in the Best Western parking lot was to my grandfather because she left her boyfriend without any money, and he told her he would wire her some to complete the trip home. My mother also found someone who was willing to let us stay in her home for a few hours before continuing.
My grandparents’ home was calm, and there was a sense of relief when we returned, but there was tension between my mother and grandmother when I look back on it, and a complicated relationship I have tried to understand as it was further explained to me during my teens and adulthood.
My mother never fully recovered from what happened in Peekskill, and the effects followed her for the rest of her life. Her relationship with him ended the night we drove away, and she never went back. Whenever she talked about Peekskill, it was always brief or a funny story about that tricycle I had, asking me, “Do you remember nana and pop‑up?” reminding me how kind they were, and telling me about how we watched a marathon race in a nearby town and I asked her, “Can I have a bottle of apple juice too?” when I saw them handing bottles of water to the runners.
There were times after we came back from Peekskill when my mother would disappear, leaving me with my grandparents. The first time I remember was when she left for Pritikin, a diet center in Los Angeles that operated like a resort clinic. When she returned, she left again to visit a man she’d met there, who took her to Paris and other parts of Europe on a vacation. Even when she was home, she sometimes vanished for a day or two, and I remember the arguments between her and my grandmother about it. Once, she came back with a black eye. I was too young to understand it or to ask how it happened. There was also a period when she checked into a local rehabilitation clinic, but the sobriety didn’t last.
My mom didn’t seem to have a type when it came to men. She dated a young Turkish engineer for a short time, a husky clean‑shaven guy with a football‑player build who still lived with his mother, and a kindhearted, nerdy chef who was the complete opposite. But for all her rebelliousness, she was drawn to law enforcement too. She dated an armed security guard who was working toward becoming a police officer while also seeing an engineer who worked at Honeywell. She brought me around both. The aspiring officer was a steady presence who often picked me up and took me to the movies, sportsman shows, or just out to run errands. The engineer was 6’6”, with a deep voice and a love for the bar and party scene that matched hers. When the aspiring officer finally became a sheriff’s deputy and wanted to make good on asking her to marry him, she turned him down. She and her partner, the engineer, stayed together long‑term, but they never married, and during their rough patches she often drifted into other short‑term relationships but always returned to him.
When I was a teenager, my mom moved with her partner to the other side of Cleveland after he finally got a job offer following a couple of years of being laid off, leaving me in my grandfather’s care. I visited one or two weekends a month, and during those visits I started to see things I hadn’t noticed before. In the utility room, empty beer cans piled up for recycling showed what they drank in just a few days, alongside the vodka bottles my mom went through on her own. I noticed how many packs of cigarettes they burned through too. My visits often disrupted whatever rhythm they had, and arguments would break out. Once, her partner sat me down and told me I was a problem because he believed I was taking away the attention he expected from my mother. If I tried to disappear into a book, a copy of Rolling Stone, or my portable video‑game systems, he’d take them away and say, “It’s time for us to be a family,” or ask, “Are you enjoying yourself.”
One thing my mom encouraged was borrowing from her partner’s CD collection, an impressive one, and always without his permission. She’d make recommendations with total confidence: The Who’s “Tommy?” Absolutely. Take “Quadrophenia” and “Live at Leeds” too. If I wanted to borrow Bruce Springsteen, I had to be careful because he’d notice those missing, so I could only take one at a time. But I could walk out with two or three David Bowie or Neil Young albums without raising suspicion. And I had to return everything exactly as I found it or, as she’d quote Spicoli, “First he’s gonna kill us, then he’s gonna shit.”
During that same period, her partner was laid off again and my mom got a job at a garden center, and I saw a different side of her. It was the first job I remember her having in many years. I had just started driving and would visit after school. We’d go to dinner and she’d talk about the plants, flowers, and small trees she was caring for. I was in a horticulture program at school, and she’d compare how they handled poinsettias to how we did in our greenhouse. She also seemed to be drinking less, or going through stretches where she drank less. Around that time she discovered I was smoking cigarettes, and I remember her asking: was I just smoking cigarettes? I told her I was smoking and drinking beer but not driving if I drank. She said, “I don’t care if you smoke, but I didn’t bring you into this world for you to be drinking, so knock it off, understand?” I told her I would, but I kept drinking underage in social settings.
But the other side of my mother was always there, and even when I felt comfortable with her, it could surface and push me away. It happened when I’d show up for a planned lunch or dinner and she’d be drunk, screaming, “How dare you show up on my turf with that attitude! I’m your mother!” before shoving me against the door. Another time, I showed up to go out with her and her partner. I was sitting on the couch while he checked on her in the kitchen, and I heard him yell, “Are you fucking crazy?” Then they were both in the living room, and he said she had stabbed him in the back with a fork, which she denied while holding the fork in her hand. I said I was going to leave, and he said, “Yeah, leave me here with your psycho mother. Thanks for coming over, always a pleasure, Brian,” as I walked out. When the visits became optional, I chose distance, even though we reconnected on and off.
Before I graduated high school, my mom said she had an interest in the Catholic faith, and I noticed books about death and the afterlife on the coffee table. She also began having health problems she didn’t talk about openly. She mentioned lupus as a possibility but not a formal diagnosis, and she needed surgery at the Cleveland Clinic she didn’t explain in detail. According to my grandfather, she had a seizure on the operating table while under anesthesia, but the surgery was successful and she recovered.
A couple of weeks after my high‑school graduation, she came over one evening looking for my grandfather, who was at the VFW Hall. She was visibly upset, and when I told her he wasn’t home, she turned on me. I was in shock, not only that I was physically defending myself from my mother, that she connected with vicious right hooks, wondering how much more I could withstand, but also at the hateful nonsense coming out of her mouth that she later denied. That moment created a distance between us and forced me to see our relationship clearly.
I hadn’t spoken to my mom for almost a year when she passed away in 2002. When I told her I wanted her to get help and for us to have a better relationship, she had her partner respond, and it was met with hostility. He passed away years later, and I never saw or heard from him again after mom passed.
I mourned differently. I carried it in my own way, and it took years to sort through the mix of emotions that came with it.
There’s a photo of my mom and me when I’m about three, taken not long after we came back from Peekskill. She’s smiling as I’m stretched across her back in a piggy‑back ride, looking young, relieved, and like a mother who loves her son. There’s another photo of us when I’m around 10, at a picnic with her partner and some of their friends. In it, I look nervous and withdrawn. I remember always feeling that way around them, especially when they were drinking. My mom made me walk on eggshells whenever we were with her partner or going somewhere with him, and I never knew when things might turn volatile.
I’ve seen other photos that still make me laugh, especially one from the late ’90s with her stubbornly ’80s hair, a cigarette in hand, watching me open a Christmas gift with an expression that could’ve been lifted straight from an Awkward Family Photos meme. Someone who knew her during high school showed me a picture of her sitting on the hood of her Corvette in the ’70s, looking every bit the femme fatale.
There were times when she showed vulnerability and real concern for my wellbeing, especially when it came to underage drinking and my academic performance. I see those moments as her showing her authentic self and being my mom, and even though times like that were random, there were many.
But the other side of my mother, something that surfaced with or without alcohol, pointed to a past I will never fully understand. It was rooted in a secrecy she never talked about, only hinted at in private without details or names. Others close to her have said she did the same with them, leaving more questions than answers.
I also feel now that my mother wanted to be fully present as a parent, and something she was battling kept getting in the way. Her anger and behavior stayed close to pain she never spoke about and found its way out in other ways, toward the people she loved and in the relationships she tried to hold together. That’s where my mourning for her seems to begin — in the space between what I witnessed and what I’ll never know, and in allowing grace for the parts of her life that remained hidden.
